M Score and New Options in Measuring Audience and Music

As programmers and software developers have been playing around more and more with the new PPM data and lining it up with services like Mediabase as well as actual station logs it's starting to produce scores for the songs.  Suddenly we can see patterns of listening if we build the ultimate formula and now it's producing a number for the music.  

But what does the number mean?  That is still to be determined.  Recently I talked with Rich Meyer who developed Media Base back in the 90s to track song airplay.  Rich has now moved on to a new world creating Airplay Intel which is designed to try and make sense from all these numbers.  A number of stations already use the service and must subscribe to Media Monitors, M Score and of course Arbitron PPM to access all the data.  Rich has been working a building a reliable index to measure the data so we can capture a real audience score.  

You can read more about Rich's latest adventure at in his All Access Interview.

While Rich's work is ground breaking and the whole system very fascinating I think it's safe to wonder if this is real music research or not.  Are we tipping the scale too much in favor of PPM behavior over the audience's real like or dislike of the song?